Author: Ken Finkel

The proudest moment for the Philadelphia rowhouse was in Chicago, of all places.

A two-story “Workingman’s House” was “put up at the Columbian Exposition,” reported Talcott Williams in 1893. And “there’s nothing more wonderful in all that marvelous Exposition than this proof that the laws, the habits, and the business of a city of one million people can be so arranged that even the day labor earning only $8 or $10 a week can own the roof over his head and call no man landlord.”

Williams noted that Philadelphia’s 80,000 rowhouses of the previous six decades had dramatically refashioned the city. “Philadelphia is not a city of palaces for the few, but a city of homes for the many—which is better,” he wrote. “It may not be “magnificent, but it is comfortable.”

Seven out of eight families in Philadelphia lived in “separate houses.” By comparison, in New York “only one family in six lives in a separate house…”

More than a matter of a family enjoying the “daily blessings” of “its own bath-tub, its own yard, its own staircase, and its own door step,” according to Williams, this was nothing less than “one of the world’s great industrial miracles.” He imagined the modest Philadelphia rowhouse as a declaration of independence in brick and mortar, a moral, populist victory that earned the city both domestic and civic superiority.

Philadelphia’s expanses of two-story rowhouses, claimed this oft-cited passage (also from 1893) “typify a higher civilization, as well as a truer idea of American home life, and are better, purer, sweeter than any tenement house systems that ever existed. They are what make Philadelphia a city of homes, and command the attention of visitors from every quarter of the globe.”

But for all the praise, there was a definite downside. Even Williams admitted that “street after street of small-two story brick houses looks rather mean and dingy,” noting that cobblestone pavements were bound to appear “rough and dirty.” But, he concluded, it’s “better to have bath-rooms by the ten thousand in small homes, than to have brilliant fountains playing in beautiful squares.”

No denying the “monotonous architectural effect” caused by endless miles of rowhouses. According to city planning pioneer Andrew Wright Crawford in 1905, the real estate developers were to blame. “In order to build the greatest number of houses on a street, they “want it straight and rectangular. They don’t care for the persons who are to live in these houses afterwards, and still less to they care for the good of the city as a whole.”

“This idea has been carried out with unremitting perseverance,” stated Crawford. All natural undulations had been leveled “throwing [a] severe mantle of unloviness” over the city’s many neighborhoods. “It is too late for Philadelphia to profit much by the broader intelligence of the present time,” admitted Crawford, “but it is possible that other cities and towns may learn something from her misfortune.”

It wasn’t as if Philadelphians hadn’t been warned early and often.

Visiting from industrial London in the 1840s, Charles Dickens described Philadelphia as “a handsome city, but distractingly regular. “After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.”

In the 1830s, Thomas Hamilton visited and noted “the traveler is at first delighted with this Quaker paradise,” but “every street that presents itself seems an exact copy of those which he has left behind.” Hamilton’s patience wore thin and he soon felt “an unusual tendency to relaxation about the region of the mouth, which alternately terminates in a silent but prolonged yawn.”

“Philadelphia is mediocrity personified in brick and mortar,” he wrote. “It is a city laid down by square and rule, a sort of habitable problem,—a mathematical infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity, —a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.”

As early as 1790, none other than Thomas Jefferson advised those contemplating designs for the nation’s next and permanent capital to avoid Philadelphia’s “disgusting monotony”—a complaint that Jefferson claimed was shared by “all persons.”

By the 1940s, when novelist Jack Dunphy set his tale of the unpleasant life and desperate death of John Fury in working-class South Philadelphia, he employed the city’s endless rows with their familiar, expressive, depressing power. As Fury walked home from yet another hard day on the job as a coal-wagon driver, he crossed “Washington Avenue and walked down Nineteenth Street past Mifflin Street and Snyder Avenue until he came to a narrow side street. The street crushed between bigger streets was a poor affair, similar in width, to an alley. Its houses smothered close together, jammed two stories high, and with small wooden porches hung on their fronts, looked like stony red-faced criminals serving a life sentence. Stuck together and dependent one upon the other, they seemed to live in constant fear that someday and somehow one would be pardoned and leave and so jeopardize the rest of them. They stood then, these square red bricked houses, and there were many of them in Philadelphia, tortured row upon row of them, doing penitence and allowing life with its worn semblance of freedom to crowd within them.”

No coincidence that “Philadelphia noir” became a thing in the 20th century.

Actually, it always was a thing.

[For more posts on the Philadelphia rowhouse, see “The Quintessential Object of Industrial Philadelphia;” “How Philly Got Flat: Piling it on at the Logan Triangle;” and “The Philadelphia Rowhouse: American Dream Revisited.”]

 

“Did you know,” asked the Tribune’s Joe Rainey in July 1931, “that never in the history of theatricals has one playhouse presented to the amusement lover as many stars as the Pearl Theatre…in the past six months?”

“A vaudeville and picture house” at 21^st Street and Ridge Avenue, the Pearl opened Thanksgiving Day, 1927. First up was Lottie Gee, “the scintillating star of ‘Chocolate Dandies,’ ‘Running Wild’ and ‘Shuffle Along.’” Edith Spencer performed her “clever, original and unique song and dance numbers.” The audience enjoyed Sheldon Brooks, the Okeh recording artist, as well as the Taskiana Four, “melodic harmonizers without peers.” Don Heywood and his New York Syncopators were joined by Beano, “The Dancing Phool” and Watts and Ringold provided a comic finale before the “feature picture:” Tom Mix and his horse Tony in “Silver Valley.”

“Come end enjoy vaudeville and photoplays at their best,” promised the Pearl. “Watch our shows each week grow bigger and greater. Nothing in the history of amusements in Philadelphia has even equaled our effort for novelty, variety, comedy, ensemble, beauty and importance.”

The Pearl paired up Wilbur Sweatman, “The Colored King of Jazz with “The Loves of Carmen” starring Delores Del Rio. Soon after came Clara Bow in her Paramount production, “Hula,” directed by Victor Fleming. But not before a live feature with heavyweight pugilist George Godfrey, “The Black Shadow” and Wilbur De Paris with his band.

A seat in the orchestra? Fifty cents in the evening, thirty cents for a matinee. Balcony seats? Thirty five cents in the evening, twenty cents for a matinee.

“Meet your family, your girl or boy friend but do not stand outside or in the lobby. Meet them where you will be comfortable while waiting in our Salon on our Mezzanine Floor.” The ushers—and the Pearl’s want ads said only “light colored” and “good looking” applicants need apply—would welcome you.

“One of the greatest dispensers of rhythm in the land today,” Cab Calloway, stood for a long run, from January to July, 1931. “Night after night, millionaires have been seen rubbing elbows with the colored patrons…when their desires have carried them to this uptown house to see the paramount colored performers of the land under the spotlight. Many have driven from sixty to one hundred miles to see some of the sable actors and actresses who have made history for themselves…”

“Colored people didn’t have to go to a white house to see a stellar attraction.” Instead, “whites had to come to a colored house”—and according the Tribune, “it looked as if they liked it.”

“All races and classes have apparently been willing to form lines sometimes two blocks long just to gain entrance and see the ‘Duke,’ the ‘Cab,’ (and) the ‘Bojangles.” Ethel Waters, Bennie Moten and his band, Nina Mae McKinney (the star of “Hallelujah”) and Earl (Snakehips) Tucker who had recently headlined at the Lincoln downtown at Broad and Lombard. Audiences applauded George Dewey Washington, Eddie Green, Tim Moore, Chick Webb, Miller and Lyles and Butterbeans and Susie.

The 1,400-seat Pearl and the other Ridge Avenue Jazz emporiums are all gone. But there’s no stopping memory. On Saturday May 6^th, Jazz history advocate Faye Anderson will lead a “Ridge Avenue Stroll Through Philly’s Jazz History” starting at the site of the Blue Note at 15^th and Ridge. You’ll spot her holding a sign proclaiming “This Place Matters.”

The 13-stop stroll, organized by PlanPhilly as part of their Jane’s Walk series, will visit and recall the entire set of star-struck sites, from the Nite Cap, the Bird Cage Lounge, Butler’s Paradise Café, Ridge Cotton Club, Checker Café, Mr. Chips Bar, Irene’s Café, and, of course, the Pearl on Ridge.

[Sources: Irvin R. Glazer, Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); The Philadelphia Tribune: “Joe Wood to Manage New Pearl Theatre.” Nov 17, 1927; “Want Ad, November 18, 1927; “Lottie Gee, Edith Spencer and Sheldon Brooks Open The Pearl,” November 24, 1927; “New Million Dollar Colored Theatre,” (Advertisement) December 5, 1927;  “The Pearl Theatre,” December 8, 1927;  “Snappy Show At Pearl,” December 20, 1927; “Where to Go and What to See,” May 14, 1931; “Theatres: Did You Know That?,” by Joe Rainey, July 2, 1931; and “Jules Bledsoe at Pearl,” May 10, 1932.]

In the Spring of 1919, “Marian Dawley and a few other girls of color…went to the movie theater at 59th and Market Streets.” They lined up to buy tickets and were told “all tickets for colored people have been sold.”

They left “disgusted,” according to the Philadelphia Tribune.

Other than The Standard Theatre on the 1100 block of South Street, audiences of color had few options for entertainment. “The white theatres are and have been for some time drawing the color line,” pointed out the Tribune. “We have but one theatre owned and controlled by our race in this city, and when it is full, which is at every performance, there is practically no place for our people to go.”

But change was coming, readers learned. “In a few months the new Dunbar theatre will be completed at the corner of Broad and Lombard Streets.” This theatre, The Dunbar, will be “owned and controlled by citizens of color” to serve the city’s African American theatregoers, which, as a result of the Great Migration, was estimated at 50,000.

“The Quality Amusement Company, of which Mr. E. C. Brown, of the Brown and Stevens, Bankers is the head” soon had “ten Negro Theatres…in cities including Savannah, Richmond, Washington (Howard) New York (Lafayette) and Chicago.” Philadelphia’s promised to be “the finest theatre in the world owned, managed and controlled by colored people.”

“It was a grand spectacle December 29, [1919] to see the thousands of happy souls, men and women, boys and girls, as they wended through the streets of Philadelphia and filled every available space in the new Dunbar Theatre…  The colored citizens of Philadelphia have something really their own,” something “that they will be and are proud of and can boast about” something “wonderful, marvelous, almost inconceivable, yet so true.”

“Within The Law,” starring Cleo Desmond and Andrew Bishop filled the 1600-seat house twice daily for a solid week. And thanks to the Lafayette Players, the productions kept coming.

John T. Gibson, owner of the Standard Theatre responded by cutting his ticket prices. Gibson, according to A History of African American Theatre knew that the Dunbar’s parent company “had overextended itself by building the $500,000 Douglass Theatre in Baltimore, as well as the Renaissance Theatre in Harlem.” And in September 1921, just a few months after the “Shuffle Along” premiered at the Dunbar, Gibson bought the theater.

As the stage of choice, “Gibson’s New Dunbar Theatre” hosted the full array of African American talent: Will Marion Cook’s Internation Orchestra and Entertainers in the Quintessence of Jazz; the Ethiopian Art Theater’s version of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” fresh from its run on Broadway;  The  Lafayette Players productions of “The Shoplifters” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame;” the Manhattan Players’ “Cat and the Canary; “Sunshine Sammy;” “Runnin’ Wild;” “Swanee River Home;” “Struttin’ Time;” “Come Along Mandy;”  Mamie Smith; and “The Chocolate Dandies,” featuring Josephine Baker’s first Philadelphia appearance.

The Great Depression forced the sale of Gibson’s Dunbar to new (white) owners, who added a giant marquee, dubbed it The Lincoln and continued to bring in the talent including Duke Ellington and his Orchestra and Cab Callaway, “the Heidi Ho King and his original Cotton Club Orchestra,” who brought “Mini the Moocher” back to life once more. The Lincoln stage saw “Fats” Waller, Louis Armstrong, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Earl Hines, Ethel Waters, as well as other headliners.

From the beginning, the theater played a critical role in addition to serving as the city’s most desirable stage for African American performers. The Lincoln was often dedicated to race relations, human rights and political protest.

In 1920, the Bramhall Players, an interracial troupe, presented Butler Davenport ‘s “Justice,” described as a “race drama.” Where “Uncle Tom’s Cabin “went far to free the Negro’s body from bondage” “Justice,” claimed one review, “will go far to liberate the white man’s mind from prejudice.”

Three years later, more than 3,500 packed a mass meeting in the theater to protest “The Shame of America” and support passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill.

And in December 1938, The Lincoln hosted a public meeting denouncing “Nazi Germany’s persecutions of racial and religious minorities” warning that “such actions are sympathetically received in some quarters in this country.” About 500 attended the event, sponsored by the United Committee Against Racial and Religious Persecutions. It began with a march up South Street, from 5^th to 15^th and then to The Lincoln, where “an effigy of Adolf Hitler, replete in brown shirt swastika and mustache…in front of the theatre…was publicly burned.”

Such was Broad and Lombard’s well-earned niche, once-upon-a-time.

[Sources include: “All Seats For Colored People Are Sold Out,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 8, 1919; Philadelphia to Soon Have a New Colored Play House, Philadelphia Tribune, November  8, 1919; “The Dunbar Theatre has Swung Open its Doors to the Public,” Philadelphia Tribune, January 3, 1920; “Phila. Has “Something New Under the Sun,” by Anny Boddy, Philadelphia Tribune, January 3, 1920; The Crisis, 1920, vols. 21-22, Advertisement for  “Justice;” “Anti-Lynching Bill Support Asked,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 1923; “Hitler’s Effigy Burned by Crowd,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 6. 1938; and Advertisements for The Dunbar and The Lincoln, 1920-1936 in The Philadelphia Inquirer. ]

“Fourteen Thousand Negro Actors in This Country Now Performing,” read a headline at the start of the 1922 theatrical season. “In vaudeville alone there are more than six hundred acts, of which are about sixty are now in Europe. There are twenty-two Negro minstrel shows touring the south.” According to Billboard, “368 theaters in the United States [are] devoted entirely to the colored race.” Among them, in Philadelphia: the Standard near 11th and South Streets, the Royal near 15th and South and the Nixon on 52nd Street. Plus the only theater built, owned and operated by African Americans: the Dunbar at Broad and Lombard.

From the moment it opened at the Dunbar on April 11, 1921, Eubie Blake’s “Shuffle Along” demonstrated the power of the African American Jazz Sensation. “A ball of merriment rolling at aero-plane speed,” “Shuffle Along” would complete its run on Broad in Philly and return again before opening on Broadway in New York where critics raved. “The biggest hit New York has witnessed in years… a breeze of super-jazz blown up from Dixie” that would, over the next 60 weeks, establish a 500-performance legacy before going on tour.

“Whether you like jazz or not,” admitted the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Leopold Stowkowski in 1924, “it is a modern featurization of our hectic times and it is with us to stay.” Eubie Blake suggested that jazz’s “flash and fire” generated “flamboyant effectiveness” both artistically and commercially. It offers up “ingredients of freshness in a world where there must be freshness constantly.”

“Shuffle Along” would become the gold standard for American musical theater and for the Dunbar. Time and time again, managers would mount jazz and vaudeville productions hoping for another hit. They promoted “Liza” as the “musical thrill that won’t let your feet behave,” the “logical successor to ‘Shuffle Along.’” They opened “Carolina Nights” with choreography by Charlie Davis, the “dancing cop” from “Shuffle Along.”

In the first half of the 1920s, Dunbar audiences would enjoy “Creole Follies,” “Harlem Follies,” “Ebony Follies” and “Charleston Fricassee.” They came out for “Come Along Mandy;”  “Runnin’ Wild;” “Banville Dandies Revue;” Jimmie Cooper’s All Colored Revue “Hotsy Totsy” and Mamie Smith and her “Syncopators’ Revue Cyclonic Jazz Band.” None took off quite like “Shuffle Along.”

“There is no color line in the theater” proclaimed one Inquirer critic, claiming the broad and sustained appeal of “Shuffle Along” as proof. Yet there was a color line, possibly even several. Racial discrimination by mainstream theaters was one of the reasons the African American community built the Dunbar in the first place. And as quickly as the blockbuster “Shuffle Along” found a home at the Dunbar, after the extended Broadway run, it would return, but to greener pastures on Broad Street. In May 1923, “Shuffle Along” opened for a four-week run not at the Dunbar, but at the Forrest Theatre, then at Broad and Sansom Streets, a mainstream venue with a much larger stage and, more to the point, 400 additional seats for eager ticket buyers. Ironically, the success of African American productions would undercut the success of the Dunbar.

And this time, “Shuffle Along” came to Philadelphia with the 16-year-old Josephine Baker on its chorus line.

“When the best part of a capacity house singles out one little girl in the chorus and gives her attention every time she appears,” raved a critic, “it shows the recognition of qualities as stars are made of. There is a girl like this in the all-colored musical success, ‘Shuffle Along,’ at the Forrest Theatre. She is a sturdy youngster with a winning way and comedy that asserts itself in everything she does. She is one of the happy-honeysuckles and her name is Josephine Baker. Jolly as she seems to be in her work, the stage romping is serious business with Josephine. … Miss Baker has been in the professional only a short time but she has done much during that period. She knows how to make people laugh and how to sing and dance.”

Would Josephine Baker ever debut at the Dunbar?

She would. In November 1924, Baker performed in “Chocolate Dandies,” another Eubie Blake show. “With snap and zest and to the tune of much musical melody, ‘The Chocolate Dandies’ ‘strutted their stuff’ into Philadelphia… The lid was off and it was a race all evening” and the double-jointed “Josephine Baker carries off the honors.”

When “Chocolate Dandies” closed, it was Baker’s last appearance at the Dunbar and her next to the last appearance on Broad Street. In February 1928, after Baker had relocated to Paris and performed at the Folies Bergèr, a clip of her famous “banana skirt” dance made its way into a film travelogue, “Paris by Night,” being shown at the Academy of Music at Broad and Locust Streets. No matter that the film had been “viewed by more than 150,000 people and 15 cities without creating criticism on its alleged impropriety.” One Philadelphia “patron” had lodged her complaint about Baker’s “lack of garb” and the censors deleted Baker’s performance from all subsequent screenings.

It wouldn’t be the last time official censors would have their way with African-American artists and their work on stage in Philadelphia.

[Sources include: “Dunbar Theatre To Open Monday, December 29th ,” The Philadelphia Tribune, December 27, 1919; “Shuffle Along,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 12, 1921; “Shuffle Along: Biggest New York Hit,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 11, 1921; “There are Many Colored Thespians,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 17, 1922; “’Shuffle Along:’ Breezy Musical Show Scores a Big Hit at the Forrest,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 8, 1923; “She Is a Real Comedy Chorus Girl,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 20, 1923; “How a Jazzer Views Such Music,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 23, 1924; “Chocolate Dandies Score at Dunbar,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 25, 1924; “Paris Night Life Scene Cut From Travel Film,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 19, 1928.]

The “People’s Mayor” or “political chameleon”? From his flamboyant, convention hall swearing in during a “howling snowstorm” in January 1936 to his indictment less than three years later, Philadelphia’s mayor wielded power with flair. As historian John Rossi put it: “Hardly a week passed that didn’t witness some dramatic gesture” on the part of Philadelphia’s Mayor S. Davis Wilson.

He battled in the courtroom and in the Press with the city’s privately owned utilities, claiming the people were being robbed. “I’m going to wipe out the whole system” he boasted in a hallway argument with a young Richardson Dilworth, lawyer for the PRT (Philadelphia Rapid Transit) before promising to punch him in the nose.

(“Like hell you are,” Dilworth replied, as he shed his coat. “I’d like to see you try.”)

Wilson grabbed headlines every which way: luring the Democratic Party to bring their Presidential convention to Philadelphia, convincing organizers of the Army-Navy football game that Philadelphia should be their city of choice and the Philadelphia Orchestra to produce pop concerts. He urged the Mummers to reschedule their New Year’s Day parade to a more spectator-friendly time of year. And just for the sake of yet one more headline, Wilson offered the position of superintendent of Philadelphia police to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Wilson seemed everywhere—and was, with his name “stenciled on all kinds of city property” from “traffic lights to trashcans,” earning him another nickname: “Ashcan Wilson.”

As his first year in office came to a close, Mayor Wilson attended the revue “New Faces” at the Forrest Theatre. Actors portrayed the former and current first ladies, Mrs. Hoover and Mrs. Roosevelt, haranguing Girl Scouts “on the delicate subject of babies.” Wilson walked out.

“It’s a damnable outrage, to poke fun at the President’s wife!” exclaimed the Mayor. “Take that skit out – or I’ll stop the whole show,” he demanded. It didn’t seem to matter that “New Faces” had run for months in New York without complaint, or that the First Ladies actually appreciated the humor.

“Either the skit goes,” demanded Wilson, “or the show does.”

The skit went.

Theater critic Linton Martin worried what Wilson’s “attitude and its enforcement could and would do” to Philadelphia’s stage. Several productions of recent years would have been shorn of their smartest and most smarting shafts of satire…”

Martin and Philadelphia’s audiences didn’t have to speculate for long.

Wilson again acted as the city’s official censor on the eve of the opening of “Mullato” at the Locust Street Theatre. Langston Hughes’s play held the record for the longest running Broadway production by an African-American (before Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin In The Sun”). At the New York opening in 1935, critic Brooks Atkinson called “Mulatto” a “sobering sensation.” Anticipating its arrival in Philadelphia, The Inquirer described the play as “a melodrama of miscegenation in the South” telling the story of “a wealthy Southern planter who philanders with his housekeeper” and sends “his four Mulatto children…North to be educated. The Yankee environment instills in them the spirit of equality, so that when they return to the plantation they antagonize their family and neighbors.” Advertisements promised a “darling drama of sex life in the South.”

“It will probably cure no ills and provoke no race riots,” wrote Percy Hammond, somewhat prophetically. And not once did “Mulatto’s” 373 performances in New York or its three month-run in Chicago stir the hint of a riot. But that’s what Mayor Wilson claimed to fear in Philadelphia.

“The show won’t go on,” declared the mayor, claiming “Mulatto” was “an outrageous affront to decency.”

“As long as I am mayor,” Wilson remarked to The New York Herald Tribune, “I will not permit such shows in Philadelphia.” He sought confirmation from his “special censor group” which previewed an edited version of the play. “Mulatto” producer Jack Linder assured the censors and the Press that “many changes have been made” and “the objectionable features have been removed.” One critic wondered whether enough “soap and water has been applied to make it safe for Philadelphia consumption.”

The mayor’s censors came in with a tie: 3-3. One publicly criticized Wilson’s last-minute ban as “stupid and unfair” and was relieved of her duties. Wilson stuck to his original decision and posted police at the entrances of the darkened theater.

“Mulatto” found audiences elsewhere, as close as the Garden Pier Theatre in Atlantic City the following August. And two years later, after Wilson’s death of a stroke, the play’s producers attempted again to bring “Mulatto” to the Philadelphia stage, this time at the Walnut Street Theatre. But Wilson’s successor invoked the earlier decision and debate continued. As the courts considered the ban, the Reverend Marshall L. Shepard, compared “the play’s possible importance to that of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’” He couldn’t understand “why the play should provoke rioting. It only depicts the truth.”

Wilson’s censorship stood. And from what we can tell, Langston Hughes’ “Mulatto” has yet to have its Philadelphia premiere.

[Sources Include: “Race Problems in the South the Theme of ‘Mulatto,’ a ‘New Drama’ by Langston Hughes. By Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times, October 25, 1935; “The New York Theatre,” by Percy Hammond, The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 3, 1935; “The Call Boys Chat: New Faces,” by Linton Martin, The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936; “Wilson and Lawyer Near Fight Over P.R.T.” The New York Times, February 4, 1936; “Mayor Plays Gallant, Bans Girl Scout Skit,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 10, 1936; “The Playbill,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 7, 1937; “Mayor Won’t Yield; Show Fails To Open,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 9, 1937; “Philadelphia Halts The Play ‘Mulatto,’” The New York Times, February 9, 1937; “Mrs. Favorite to Lose Job on Theatre Censor Board,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 10, 1937; “Censors Tie On ‘Mulatto,’” The New York Times, February 11, 1937; “The Call Boy’s Chat: Revues In This Land of the Free-for-All,” by Linton Martin, The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 15, 1936;   “The Call Boy’s Chat: Taking the Dare Out of Dubious Drama;” by Linton Martin, The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 14, 1937;  “Indict Mayor of Philadelphia in Vice Inquiry,” Chicago Daily Tribune; September 10, 1938; John P. Rossi, “Philadelphia’s Forgotten Mayor: S. Davis Wilson, Pennsylvania History, Vol. 51, No. 2 (April,1984); Joseph McLaren, Langston Hughes, Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921-1943 (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997).]

William Rush, ship figurehead carver extraordinaire, had done it again. His “bold and striking likeness of the President” on the 250-ton ‘General Washington’” gave “pleasure to every spectator” according to the Pennsylvania Journal. This time, Rush had notched his game up from a tomahawk-wielding “Indian Trader” with a real, life-size, sitting commander-in-chief. So practical, so promising—so distinctly American—here in the 1790s, was a reality show on the prow of a ship. It transformed the busy docks of Philadelphia and London into sculpture galleries.

As a practical patriot, Rush knew what would speak to the American spirit—and what wouldn’t. He deployed his talents in a modest and practical way, scaling to the moment, the American reality.

Giuseppe Ceracchi, on the other hand, that ambitious goldsmith from Rome, was neither aligned nor in synch with that reality.

Ceracchi “burst upon the American scene” in 1791, “fresh from the rabid republican turbulence of Revolutionary Paris, filled with a volcanic enthusiasm for Liberty and the Rights of Man…” Knowing Continental Congress had not yet commissioned the equestrian statue of the Founding Father approved in 1783, he presented Congress with a proposal for a giant, operatic design of extraordinary scale. Ceracchi described it in a letter to Congress and tacked his sketch of it on a wall at Oellers Hotel at 6th and Chestnut Streets.

Ceracchi’s baroque “Monument designed to perpetuate the Memory of American Liberty” would feature a larger-than-life-bronze Washington on his horse atop a rocky summit surrounded by allegorical groups “to be of the finest Italian Marble.” According to the artist’s description, “Liberty arrives on American soil in a chariot driven by Saturn” pulled by four winged horses. Poetry and History welcome her while Philosophy removes the blinding-veil from Policy. Meanwhile, Valor “faces down terror-stricken Despotism.” Each of the allegorical figures, which would include Apollo and Clio, Neptune and Mercury, Nature and Minerva, Genius and Fame, would stand fifteen feet tall. Ceracchi envisioned his entire pompous project at least sixty feet, possibly even one hundred feet tall.

Congress seemed star-struck enough to entertain the idea, no doubt helped by Ceracchi’s offer to take “no pecuniary Reward” willing to be “satisfied with the Glory, which his performance will receive from the Subject itself.” Ceracchi demonstrated his skill and intentions by sculpting a life-sized marble bust of the President as a Roman emperor (with appropriate ancient hair style and toga) and he sculpted in terracotta a portion of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, which would watch over Congress as it deliberated. In the end, however, Congress chose not to fund the commission. (“At the present time it might not be expedient to go into the expenses which the Monument . . . would require, especially with the additional ornaments proposed by the artist.”) And so the Washington bust eventually found its way into the Metropolitan Museum and Minerva came to rest at the Library Company.

An equestrian Washington would take another fifty years in New York and Richmond, and more than another century in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, the modest, earnest Rush, sculptor of pine—never bronze or marble—moved up the creative ranks from ship carver to the “First American Sculptor.” And in 1815, two decades after the collapse of Ceracchi’s proposal, Rush produced “a dramatic and spirited interpretation of the first American president as a statesman.”

Writes Linda Bantell: “Washington wears the costume of the period over which is draped a ‘flowing Grecian mantle’” to use Rush’s own words. It “cascades over the edge of the pedestal. In his right hand, Washington holds an unfurling scroll while leaning on a book (a common symbol for wisdom), on top of a Doric column (for fortitude); his right foot is thrust forward, catching the edge of a second scroll as it too unfurls.”

Rush’s down to earth, full -standing, in-the-moment wooden Washington was everything Ceracchi’s was not. Nowhere was the heavy-duty allegorical narrative. Gone was the imported marble and the imperial posturing. Here stood the man, not in bronze, or in marble, or even in rare imported wood. This wooden, not-even-quite-life-size Washington was carved in plain American pine and placed in Independence Hall to greet the Marquis de Lafayette on his return visit to America in 1824. Lafayette claimed it revived in his memory Washington’s “majesty of countenance, the affability of his manner, and the dignity with which he addressed those about him.”

In 1831, Rush rejected an insultingly low offer of $500 from a potential private buyer. That would only reimburse Rush for his months of labor so many years before, he complained. But when the City of Philadelphia matched the offer, Rush accepted. And so the wooden Washington stood in Independence Hall for the next century and a half, as genuinely presidential a work of art as there might ever be in America.

And Rush’s reputation? It would forever hover somewhere between “inspired artisan” and “sculptural genius”—an appropriately American immortality.

[Sources include: Linda Bantel, William Rush, American Sculptor (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1982); “Enclosure: Giuseppe Ceracchi to the United States Senate and House of Representatives, 31 October 1791,” Founders Online, National Archives; To George Washington from Giuseppe Ceracchi, 31 October 1791,” Founders Online, National Archives; Wayne Craven , “The Origins of Sculpture in America: Philadelphia, 1785-1830,” The American Art Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Nov., 1977); Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, “Fragment of a Lost Monument,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, Vol. 6, No. 7 (Mar., 1948).]

As early Philadelphia expanded, the city’s spine of market shambles kept up. “The market could…be conveniently extended in the same plan,” wrote an observer in 1809, almost giddy that Philadelphia might be able to maintain its century-old shopping traditions in the new century. But 19^th-century growth would outpace everyone’s expectations, rendering the last remaining shambles a quaint, shabby, vestige.

The city mid-century “market mania” ushered in an era of grand market halls that modernized food buying with a collection of block-long, light-filled, state-of-the-art venues for hundreds of vendors and thousands of shoppers. Many Philadelphians liked these markets, as well as the bragging rights they offered, but others preferred to shop at the city’s vestigial vintage shambles.

“There were three phases in the logical development of a market,” explained the author of a 1913 study, “first, the curbstone market; second, the open shed; and third, and the modern enclosed market house. Strange as it may seem, Philadelphia’s municipal markets are in the second phase—namely open sheds. The North and South Second Street markets are all that remain to us of Philadelphia’s once well-developed market system.” The 18^th-century design had been updated with “sheet iron roofs, cement floors and the systematizing of the numbering of the stalls.” Otherwise “they stand as they were built.” Just the way many Philadelphians, who were exceedingly proud of their old market shambles, and their old marketing ways, had always liked it.

“Few cities can boast of markets better supplied with the bounties of nature than Philadelphia,” claimed one mid-19th-century guidebook. “Let the reader, particularly if a stranger, take a tour of observation through them, especially on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, and he will behold an exceedingly interesting and gratifying spectacle. He will find those buildings well supplied with all kinds of meat, poultry, game, fish, vegetables, fruit, &c., while the streets in the immediate vicinity are crowded in all directions with well-filled baskets.”

“These markets, distributed throughout the city, embrace altogether over forty entire squares, in addition to the range of wagon stands on Market Street and Second Street, which of themselves form a line equal in extent to three miles.”

Here’s where the shambles stood:

“High Street Market. — Those long ranges of buildings that line this noble avenue, were not contemplated in the original plan of the city. Penn designed Centre Square for this purpose. The first of these houses was erected in 1710; it extended half way up from Second Street. In 1729, it was carried up to Third Street, where, for a long period, it was marked with the appendages of Pillory, Stocks, and Whipping Post. … Before the Revolution, the markets were extended to Fourth Street and eventually stretched all the way to Eighth Street. “In 1836, the old market-houses were torn down, and the present light and airy structures were erected.” At the easternmost end stood a fish market and a New Jersey Market with a domed head house flanked by cornucopia. West of Broad Street, the markets extended from two more blocks.

“South Second Street Market extends from Pine to Cedar (South) Street.

“North Second Street Market extends from Coates (Fairmount Avenue) to Poplar Street.

“Callowhill Street Market is situated in Callowhill Street, between Fourth and Seventh Streets.

“Shippen (Bainbridge) Street Market extends from Third to Fifth Street.

“Maiden (Laurel) Street Market, Kensington, Maiden Street, between Broad and Manderson Streets.  This is Laurel and Frankford Ave at Delaware Avenue.

“Spring Garden Market, Spring Garden Street. Extensive ranges of light and graceful market-houses line this elegant avenue, from Sixth to Twelfth Street.” The 1862 Philadelphia atlas shows another block of market sheds from 13th to Broad.

“Girard Market, Girard Avenue, between Tenth and Lewis (Warnock) Streets.” The 1862 Atlas shows market sheds from Lawrence Street (between Fourth and Fifth) to Seventh and then also from Tenth to Twelfth.

“Moyamensing Market, extends from Prime (Ellsworth) to Wharton Street.”

“Franklin Market, Franklin (Girard) Avenue…consists of two ranges; one extending (a block east to) Hancock Street to the Germantown Road (now Avenue), the other from Crown (Crease) Street to the Frankford Road (Avenue).”

“Eleventh Street Market, Moyamensing. Eleventh Street, extends from Shippen (Bainbridge) to Fitzwater Street.”  The 1862 atlas shows four blocks, from Bainbridge to Carpenter Streets.”

By 1917, market watchers knew that more than 1,500,000 Philadelphians, living in hundreds of miles of new and old blocks of rowhouses made 25,000 market visits every day. More and more, these visits were shifting to a new market genre: the corner grocery store. Philadelphia had 5,266 retail grocery stores as well as 2,004 butchers and retail meat dealers and  257 delicatessens—approximately one store for every 54 families.

“If retail markets are to succeed,” worried Clyde Lyndon King in 1917, “they must change their locations as population centers shift. Public markets have evidently not adapted themselves to these changes as quickly as have private stores.”

And to further disrupt the old market system, buyers began to use their newly-acquired telephones as shopping aides, leading some market experts to believe “there can be no public market in the day of the telephone.”

“Can we, in this day of the telephone and the corner grocery store,” wrote Achsah Lippincott, “bring back the old custom of marketing?” Many Philadelphians still appreciated the idea, but more as wistful sentiment than serious possibility. “The corner grocery has come to stay,” admitted Lippincott. And so had the telephone. If the city’s remaining vintage market shambles were going to survive, they’d do so as quaint relics at the margins of the city’s increasingly massive food distribution system.

[Sources include: Some Account of the Markets of Philadelphia,” The Port Folio, (1809), pp. 508-511; Clyde Lyndon King, Public Markets in the United States (Philadelphia, The National Municipal League, 1917); Achsah Lippincott, Municipal Markets in Philadelphia (The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science) Vols. 49-50, 1913; R. A. Smith, Philadelphia as it is in 1852, (Lindsay and Blakiston, 1852); E. M. Patterson, Co-operation among Grocers in Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Dissertation, 1915.]

“The completion of the market between the two rivers will probably take place in the present generation,” wrote an anonymous commentator in 1809, adding “a uniform, open arcade mathematically straight, two miles in length, perfect in its symmetry… will never be a contemptible object.”

But the coming generation of Philadelphians wouldn’t be so patient, or appreciative, of the vision for an urban village. While the anonymous writer worried some “pragmatical architect” might come along and “destroy this symmetry, by adopting new dimensions as to height or breadth, and taking a different curve for his arch,” the public had moved on, to the position of total demolition.

By the middle of the 19th-century, many Philadelphians had come to recognize that the city’s spine of market sheds was a vestige of a 1680s vision for a “country town” and little more than “a time-honored nuisance.” By 1850, the population would exceed 120,000 and a few years later the two-square mile city would consolidate to become one and the same with the 159-square mile county. By 1900, Philadelphia’s population would explode to nearly 1.3 million. That would demand sweeping transformation of how this sprawling, modernizing city would supply itself with victuals.  As historian Helen Tangires put it: squat, quaint, open-air markets had “no place in the emerging vision.”

That vision demanded an entirely new type of building: spacious market halls with soaring arched ceilings made possible by modern trusses accommodating hundreds of vendors and thousands of shoppers. These market halls would join the repertoire of large urban building types: city halls, schools, museums, libraries, theaters, factories, train sheds and depots. They’d play a distinct role, explains Tangires, in a 19^th-century “moral economy” where government and private interests collaborated to support the community’s social, political and physical well-being. And Philadelphia, as it so happened, provided perfect conditions for this market movement to flourish.

Four years after consolidation, “in the wake of the demolition” of Market Street’s old sheds, writes Tangires, 17 market companies were incorporated in the city, leading to a period of “unparalleled construction.” Each new corporation issuing stock meant another “unprecedented opportunity for speculation in food retailing,” another new hall with “the latest innovations in refrigeration, lighting, ventilation, and construction.”  Philadelphia’s “market house company mania” turned out an impressive collection of state-of-the art “market palaces.”

One by one, they opened with celebrations. At the northeast corner of 16th and Market Streets in April, 1859, architect John M. Gries‘ Western Market Company invited in the public and received praise for its arched roof and clerestory above a 170-by-150-foot interior with “280 stalls with Italian marble counter tops” divided by commodious aisles. At each end were galleries devoted to “the sale of flowers, seeds, and ice cream.” Iron-framed doors with “wicker inserts for air circulation lined the entire perimeter.”

Seven blocks away, an auction of 431 vendor stalls at the Eastern Market, a 300-by-100-foot-hall at 5^th and Commerce Streets, brought higher prices than expected, spurring more confidence and investment citywide. When the Eastern Market opened in November, 1859, a company of top-hatted hosts served a feast in the center of the main floor.

Center City would have its share of new market houses and so would neighborhoods that only a few years before were beyond the city proper. The Fairmount Market Company, incorporated in March, 1859, raised $100,000 by selling two thousand shares at fifty dollars apiece.  Before long, they started building a 100-by 300-foot hall at the northwest corner of 22^nd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

Throughout the city, from Northern Liberties to Point Breeze, from West Philadelphia to Germantown, the city’s appetites launched a golden age of market construction. And that was only the first round. “The market house company mania that began in Philadelphia in 1859 continued unabated through the rest of the state particularly during 1870s and 1880s,” writes Tangires. “They grew up like mushrooms in every part of the city.” In North Philadelphia alone, market halls cropped up at 9^th & Girard, 10^th & Montgomery, Broad & Columbia (Cecil B. Moore), 17th & Venango, 18^th & Ridge, and 20^th & Oxford—to mention but a few of the 39 listed in a City Directory from 1901.

A glorious tradition. And an unsustainable one. “Too numerous and costly,” observed Thomas De Voe as early as 1862, citing “false confidence,” false starts and early failures due to “overcapitalized and highly speculative” market halls. The Franklin Market at 10^th and Marble (now Ludlow) was soon re-purposed as the Mercantile Library. Neither the Eastern nor the Western Markets survived. Nor did the Fairmount Market. Not one of Philadelphia’s soaring halls survive. Gone are the Black Horse, the Union, the Fidelity, the Globe, the Red Star and the Red Lion. Could it be that the Green Hill Market at 17th and Poplar stands as the city’s last remaining hall of those chartered in 1859?

Ask anyone today about the city’s great food halls and they’ll point you to the Reading Terminal Market, a street-level emporium under the 1892 train shed at 12^th and Filbert Streets. It stands where not one, but two of the grand, original market halls once stood, side by side, in the heady days of Philadelphia’s “market mania.”

Architecturally, it’s the result of a steep compromise. But it’s also a proud, lone survivor.

[Sources include: “Some Account of the Markets of Philadelphia,” The Port Folio, (1809), pp. 508-511; Helen Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and “Public Markets,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia; Laws of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Pennsylvania, Passed at the Session of 1859 (Harrisburg, 1859); A Digest of Titles of Corporations Chartered by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, Between the Years 1700 and 1873 Inclusive (Philadelphia: J. Campbell & Son, 1874); Gospill’s Philadelphia City Directory for 1901 (Philadelphia: James Gospill’s Sons, 1901).]

When it comes to talking about urban change, words serve their purpose, until they are considered inadequate, wrong or just go out of style. “Slum” and “urban renewal” for instance. Usage of these terms peaked in the second half of the 1960s, but then faded. Could it be we’re beginning to see a similar downturn for “gentrification”?

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined “gentrification” in 1964. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts,” she wrote of a downtrodden district in London, “it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” Glass’s word focuses on the shifting “social character” of communities—poor neighborhoods becoming upscale destinations.

A year before Glass introduced the term, Nathaniel Burt wryly noted in Philadelphia Gentleman: “Remodeling old houses is…one of Old Philadelphia’s favorite indoor sports, and to be able to remodel and consciously serve the cause of civic revival all at once has done to the heads of the upper classes like champagne.” Burt understood “the Renaissance of Society Hill” was “just one piece of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle” with the potential “to transform the city completely.” But a one-word shorthand for that complex puzzle? Not for Burt.

City planner Edmund Bacon preferred “renewal” in his 1962 film, Form, Design and the City. But, according to Denise Scott Brown, Bacon put too much emphasis on retailing and on “a certain kind of ‘center city living’ as expressed by Society Hill … its coffee bars, tree lined streets, cobbled squares.” Such amenities appealed more to “sophisticated intellectuals and professionals” than to anyone else. Anyway, Scott Brown concluded, they are “only part of the story.”

But the cat was soon out of the bag. The popular press and the public came to love the idea of gentrification. In October 1977, the Inquirer introduced the word on page one: “Gentrification is an imposing word for a process familiar to all Philadelphians,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer, “especially to those who lived 20 years ago in Society Hill, or 10 years ago near the art museum or more recently and Queen Village…  A neighborhood close to Center City, filled with poorer residents, mostly renters, is suddenly “discovered” by middle-class people who rush in to buy and renovate the houses in the area. The run-down neighborhood suddenly becomes attractive. Higher-priced shops and restaurants open. The sidewalks, gardens, curbs, even the streets themselves are better tended. And the poor? Well, the poor go elsewhere.”

In the year following Cramer’s story, “gentrification” appeared five times in the Inquirer and the Daily News. In 1979 and 1980 it was used 25 times. Between 1981 and 1990, “gentrification” had become a staple of urban discourse, appearing more than 500 times. Just “as Ruth Glass intended,” noted social scientists, gentrification “simply yet very powerfully” captured “class inequalities and injustices”—even if some preferred the term for the wrong reasons. It implied the existence of a privileged “gentry” bored by their suburban experiment, willing to return to the city for less foliage, but a richer quality of life. Popular opinion assumed gentrification would, in time, significantly transform the entire city.

The term gained credibility and legitimacy as an accepted shorthand for the cycle of disinvestment, decline, reinvestment and revival. Public and planners came to believe that gentrification’s cycles of disinvestment and reinvestment were desirable and sustainable—a viable model for urban change.

As evidence, advocates presented the soaring values of Society Hill real estate, which rose nearly 250 percent during the 1960s alone. Discussions quickly turned to “what would become the next Society Hill”? Queen Village? Fairmount? Northern Liberties? But those were only three neighborhoods in a city with scores more, most lacking proximity to Center City.

Critics saw gentrification as “pompous and irrelevant,” an “anti-vernacular” “Trojan horse for post-industrial sustainability.” Neil Smith’s close look at data on the newcomers to Society Hill in the 1960s revealed that the vast majority were not the suburban “gentry” being re-urbanized, but folks from other city neighborhoods. Only 14% came from suburbia. Smith concluded that “the so-called urban renaissance has been stimulated more by economic than cultural forces.” When it came to making a “decision to rehabilitate an inner city structure, one consumer preference tends to stand out above the others—the preference for profit.”

How had this flawed shorthand made its way into the heart of the urban lexicon? In “Walking Backwards to the Future,” researchers suggested that perhaps the original, heady promise of a dual upgrade in class and investment was the result of “too many glasses of chardonnay … shared between researcher and gentrifier.”

Today, more and more, studies discussing gentrification include commentary suggesting counter-intuitive, even contradictory findings suggesting that it is not the defining experience in Philadelphia, or most American cities. One recent Pew study found that only 15 of Philadelphia’s 372 residential census tracts gentrified from 2000 to 2014, and that these tracts tended to be contiguous with, or near, Center City. Meanwhile, “more than 10 times that many census tracts—164 in all—experienced statistically significant drops in median household income” during the same years.

In other words, after more than half a century, “gentrification” may finally be fading as the reliable, accurate and useful description for urban change. Instead, we should be examining the more complicated “broad array of influences” and those, for the time being, are averse to shorthand.

[Sources include: Denise Scott Brown, Review of Form, Design, and the City, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 28:4, 1962; Richard Ben Cramer, “Back to the City, London Style,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 9, 1977; Susan Mayhew, A Dictionary of Geography, (Oxford University Press; 5th ed.2015); Dylan Gottlieb, “Gentrification,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, (Rutgers, 2014); Neil Smith, “Gentrification,” The Encyclopedia of Housing (Willem van Vliet ed., 1998); Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People,” in The Gentrification Debates: A Reader (Routledge, 2013); Tim Butler and Chris Hamnett, “Walking Backwards to the Future—Waking Up to Class and Gentrification in London,” Urban Policy And Research, 27:3, 2009; Philadelphia’s Changing Neighborhoods—Gentrification and other shifts since 2000 (PEW Report, May 2016).]

Every day in the depths of winter, coal cars trundled down Washington Avenue supplying the city’s lifeblood. You wouldn’t know it looking at the trackless six lanes of blacktop today, but locomotives once hauled hundreds of thousands of tons of anthracite to at least thirty coal yards between 2^nd and 25^th Streets.

Coal powered nearly every factory and heated nearly every shop, school, theater and home—a quarter of a million of them. On extremely cold days, a  large school, just one of the city’s 231, would consume as much as 10 tons. The University of Pennsylvania needed 150 tons to stay open. In all, the city could burn as much as 19,000 tons. Every day.

And on the first frigid week of January 1918, it all ground to a halt.

The temperature dropped below zero during the final days of December 1917 and would remain in the single digits for more than a week. The flow of coal from upstate stopped, and soon so would the city itself. Frigid, coal-less Philadelphians turned to the dealers of Washington Avenue, but their stockpiles were quickly exhausted. William Bryant at 10^th Street had been promised a shipment of 50 tons, but by the time the coal cars arrived, four-fifths of the contents were gone. The coal famine of January 1918 had turned citizens into coal hoarders and coal thieves. And as mobs they would decimate the coal supply of Washington Avenue.

City officials estimated as much as “half the population was without coal.” Mayor Thomas Smith urged “public recreation centers, school buildings, churches, theaters, moving picture houses and hospitals be thrown open to receive suffers and keep them warm.” As schools and factories began to close down, he appealed to “good Samaritans to take cold neighbors in.”

Philadelphia’s coal famine threatened “social and economic catastrophe.” On January 2, 1918, the coal-less poor, many of whom were newly arrived immigrants, took the matter into their own hands.

“Driven to desperation after burning fence rails, old furniture and every bit of available fuel, the poor began a series of raids on coal cars on Washington avenue” reported The Philadelphia Tribune. “Men, women and children with buckets, bags, push carts, baskets, toy express wagons and even baby buggies, worked like beavers in and among the switching crews carrying the precious fuel to their homes. There were at least 2,000 persons in these crowds and the police and railroad crews did not interfere, as the people were freezing and desperate… Women and children, for days, had stood shivering at the yards weeping and begging for coal.”

“We’re almost starving, my babies and me,” a widow sobbed to an Inquirer reporter. “It’s all right to almost starve. We’re pretty near used to that, but we can’t freeze. I could, but my babies can’t.”

“You must help us!” shouted cold and hungry women and children to the police called in to stop them. “The officers shrugged their shoulders and turned their backs” on the crowd and the coal cars. The mob took that as encouragement. Children quickly “crawled over the heads of the police…on the coal cars.”

“In a second…  a black shower descended upon the ground near the cars. As fast as the bits of coal struck the ground they were picked up and stored carefully away in a bag or a bucket or an apron.”

“What can we do?” asked one of the policemen,. “The poor devils are hungry and cold. …When a woman, lugging a baby to her breast, pushes me aside… why, I am not going to be the one to stop her.”

“I’ve seen more real misery in the last few days down here around these coal cars than I ever saw in all my police experience,” he added.

More than 150 tons of anthracite would be liberated on Washington Avenue’s coal-yard corridor that first week of 1918. According to the Inquirer, “most of the coal stolen was consigned to the J. W. Matthews Coal Company, Tenth street and Washington avenue;  William A. Bryant, of Tenth street and Washington avenue, and S. Margolis, of 815 Washington avenue.” At 12^th and Washington, men and boys emptied a coal car.

And while the police turned the other way, the railroad did not. “In the midst of the raid on one of the cars came the chugging of a freight engine. No one paid the slightest attention. The engine was hastily coupled to the car. It drew away. Not one of the coal-seekers jumped. They still continued to toss out bucket after bucket of coal.”

On the ground, “those…left behind followed the slow-moving engine and car, picking up fuel as it was thrown to them. This was only one of several raids by persons driven frantic by the want of fuel, …who, armed with buckets, bags, wheelbarrows and pushcarts, defied the police and railroad guards and mobbed trains of coal when they arrived along Washington Avenue.”

South Philly’s “coal-hunters were undaunted.”

[Sources: “Coal Lack Closes 43 Public Schools; Blame Cold Alone …Severe Weather Conditions Halt Coal Train On Way Here,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 3, 1918; “Suffering Crowds Storm Coal Yards; Railroads Helpless,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 4, 1918; “Coal Famine Grips Our City—Much Suffering,” The Philadelphia  Tribune, January 5, 1918;  R.R. Stockholders…Ask Refuge for 100,000 Suffering From Cold Here,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 5, 1918;  Men, Women and Children Empty Cars of Fuel Despite Efforts of Policemen and Guards,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 6, 1918.]